Page 71 of Needing to Fall
I cooled. “Okay, but be careful.”
He kissed my lips. “Always. I have a beautiful woman to come home to.” Pepper barked. “And a dog.”
My insides turned to goo. I went up on my tiptoes and kissed him hard and deeply, letting him know how much everything he had done meant to me.
The words I wanted to say got lodged in my throat as he pulled away, gave me a slight peck, and was gone.
I realized quickly that I was not a patient, wait-for-Lynx-to-go-do-crazy-shit type of woman. As the seconds turned into minutes and the minutes turned into hours, I cleaned every surface I could find in the house. I even cleaned around the toilet with an old toothbrush. After vacuuming and sweeping every floor, I had nothing left to clean. Nothing. Lynx had been gone for hours, and I became restless without the cleaning to take my mind off of it. What was worse, I didn’t have a shift that night at the bar.
The thing that struck me most was me and the door. I had spent so many years checking, rechecking, and triple-checking to make sure my door in the apartment was locked, that I was secured within the confines. While there in Lynx’s space, the urge to go to the door and make sure it was locked didn’t arise within me. For the first time in my life, I felt safe, and I felt it with Lynx. Even though he wasn’t there, I still had a sense of safety, something I had never had in my life. Just the thought had me smiling.
Finally, I thought I would try a movie to get my mind off of everything and calm down. I put in theFast and Furious. I freaking loved Vin Diesel, and the action of the movie kept my attention, but Lynx was always right there in my mind.
I lay on the couch, and somewhere between one of the car chases, I fell fast asleep.
I woke to my phone ringing on the coffee table. The room was only lit by the blue screen, the TV having gone into sleep mode after the movie was over.
The display saidLynx Calling, so I flipped it open.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, babe. I’m on my way to get you. Be ready to roll in five.”
Wait … what?
“Where are we going?”
“We have someone to talk to. Five minutes, Reign. Love you.” Disconnect.
Shit!
I raced through the house, throwing off my cleaning clothes and putting on some jeans and a hoodie along with my tennis shoes. Headlights peered through the curtains, and I looked out the front door window to see Lynx. I locked the door behind me and raced to him.
He hopped out of the truck and met me on my side, stopping me from opening the door.
“Trey is in the back of the cab. He’s taped up and can’t move or talk.”
Shock wasn’t even the word I felt. It was an all-consuming, holy-shit moment.
“You need to be cool with this, Reign. I found out today that asshole in there pissed off some pretty important people. We’re gonna chat with him and hand him off to those people.”
My eyes widened. “Are they going to kill him?”
“Babe, that’s not our problem. He’ll be alive when we give him over; that’s all you need to know. Everything else will be neither of our concerns.” His face was so straight, hard, unyielding. This was a side of Lynx I didn’t see every day, the one that was trained to fight and kill. Maybe I should have been scared of him like this, but I couldn’t make myself. I felt safe with him. He would never hurt me or let anyone else do so.
“I get it.” I did. Trey had made his bed. All I wanted were answers to why he had done what he did. What happened after that wasn’t on my shoulders. I learned from Wrestler McMann that everyone had their own problems, demons, and I only had to battle mine. I couldn’t take on theirs, especially when I was working so hard on mine.
Lynx softened a bit and leaned down to kiss me. Then he opened the truck door, and I jumped in.
He wasn’t kidding about Trey being taped up. His hands were bound with silver duct tape behind his back, and his knees were bent up and taped together around his ankles with a piece of tape over his lips. He also had a pretty nice shiner on his right eye.
“Hi, Trey,” I said calmly, though on the inside, I was scared as hell for so many reasons I couldn’t count them all.
He mumbled something unrecognizable before I turned in my seat and buckled my belt.
We drove for hours on the pitch dark back roads. I didn’t ask where Lynx was taking us. I trusted him and didn’t think letting Trey hear anything he wasn’t supposed to would bode well for us.
As we pulled up to a shack of a house, I instantly had a chill race up my spine. It looked like one of those places they made horror films out of. The paint was worn and falling off, the dangling shutters hung by maybe a nail or screw, and the roof looked partially caved in. There was no way anyone lived there.
